标签：#Android

A Technical PM's journey from frustration to shipping a solo Android app As a Technical Project Manager, I track time constantly. Client hours, project phases, billable work. It's part of the job. But every time tracker I tried left me frustrated. Toggl is powerful — too powerful. Every time I opened it, I had to navigate through workspaces, projects, tags, and integrations I'd never use. Clockify felt the same. Harvest was built for teams, not for someone who just wants to know where their day went. And don't get me started on the design. Most of these apps look like they were built in 2012 and never updated. So I did what any slightly obsessive PM would do: I built my own. The Problem I Was Actually Solving It wasn't that existing trackers lacked features. It was that they had too many. Every morning I'd open an app, get overwhelmed by options, and either spend 2 minutes setting up a timer correctly or just give up and track nothing. By the end of the week, I had no idea where my billable hours went — which meant I was probably undercharging clients. I wanted one thing: tap a button, start tracking. That's it. Building Tempo as a Non-Developer Here's the part that still surprises me: I built Tempo without writing a single line of code. As a Technical PM, I understand systems, workflows, and user experience — but I'm not a developer. I used AI tools to go from idea to a fully functional Android app in 2–3 months. The process wasn't always smooth. There were bugs, confusing UX decisions, and moments where I questioned whether I was building something anyone else would actually use. But I kept coming back to the same question: would I use this every day? And the answer was always yes. What Tempo Does (and Doesn't Do) Tempo is deliberately minimal: One tap to start tracking **— no setup, no forms, no friction **Billable vs non-billable toggle — know exactly what to invoice Daily & weekly reports — see where your time actually goes Custom projects with icons and colors

The atmosphere in the room was dense, the kind where every whisper echoes. I was sitting in the third row of a local community center during a Friday prayer session, my head bowed in reflection. Suddenly, a high-pitched, synthetic ringtone shattered the silence. My pocket vibrated violently, sending a jolt of anxiety through my chest. I scrambled to silence it, but the damage was done; a dozen heads turned in my direction. I wasn't just embarrassed; I was frustrated with myself for the thousandth time for forgetting the simple task of toggling a silent switch. This wasn't an isolated incident. I found myself constantly caught in a cycle of human error. I would arrive at the office, launch into a deep-work sprint, and realize two hours later that my phone had been chirping with notifications through three separate meetings. Then, I would leave the office and forget to turn the ringer back on, missing urgent calls from family throughout the evening. The friction wasn't in the hardware; it was in the expectation that a human should perfectly manage a state machine that they interact with hundreds of times a day. I realized that my phone was intelligent enough to track my location, calculate prayer times, and sync my schedule, yet it remained stubbornly passive regarding its own audio profile. Most existing automation tools were either too heavy, draining the battery within hours, or relied on cloud-based triggers that failed the moment I lost signal. I wanted something that lived on the device, respected the user's privacy, and handled the transition between 'Silent', 'Vibrate', and 'Normal' states without me ever needing to touch the screen. The goal was simple: build a background service that watches the world and adjusts the phone's volume automatically. I needed an architecture that could handle geofencing, calendar events, and time-based triggers without turning the device into a space heater. When I started building the geofencing engine for Muffle, the immediate

Transferring files and data across platforms is more straightforward than ever.

An AI agent phone is a real, or cloud-hosted, smartphone that an LLM-powered agent can operate on its own. It sees the screen, taps, swipes, types, opens apps, and completes multi-step tasks the same way a person would. Instead of calling an API, the agent uses the phone directly, the same Instagram, banking, or delivery app you'd use, driven by a model instead of a thumb. The phrase gets used two ways in 2026. Some products sell phone numbers for AI agents, voice and SMS. That's not this. Here, an AI agent phone means the device itself as something an agent controls, a full Android or iOS handset that becomes an autonomous actor. If you've heard the pitch give your AI agent a phone, this is it. Why a phone, not a browser? Most agent tooling lives in the browser, or in desktop computer use. That misses where people actually are. The world is mobile-first, and a huge share of real workflows are app-only, ride-hailing, food delivery, mobile banking, two-factor prompts, creator tools, regional super-apps. A browser agent can't install an APK, respond to a push notification, read an SMS one-time code, use the camera, or drive a native app that never ships a web build. A phone can. And there's a second reason: fidelity. When an agent operates the same app a customer uses, you're automating the real thing, not a mock, not some undocumented internal endpoint that breaks next release. How it works A mobile AI agent runs a perception-decision-action (PDA) loop against the device. The agent builds its understanding from two sources. First, the accessibility tree, the structured hierarchy of on-screen elements the OS exposes for screen readers, which gives precise, machine-readable targets. Second, vision, a screenshot passed to a multimodal model for anything the tree misses, canvas UIs, games, custom widgets. Together, the tree gives coordinates and vision gives context. The agent gets a goal in natural language, reasons about the current screen, picks the next action, and e

What is ZeroDroid? ZeroDroid is an open-source Android toolkit that exposes the radios, sensors and connected-device capabilities already present in a phone. GitHub: https://github.com/theabhishekchandra/ZeroDroid What problems does it address? The app contains 29 tools across five areas: Wireless: Wi-Fi, BLE, NFC, Bluetooth Classic and peer-to-peer connections RF and signals: IR, UWB, SDR-device detection and ultrasonic analysis Sensors: GPS/GNSS, QR analysis, device sensors and magnetic anomalies Network: USB inspection, cell-tower information and wardriving Security: tracker scanning, hidden-camera indicators, rogue-AP detection, network scanning and deauthentication indicators Architecture ZeroDroid uses Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3, MVVM, StateFlow, Hilt and Room. Services are lazy-loaded, and scanning begins only when the user starts a tool. Important limitations A smartphone cannot guarantee that it has found every camera, tracker, bug or network threat. Several detections are heuristic and may produce false positives or miss threats. Hardware availability also differs between Android devices. The project is intended only for education, defensive security and testing devices or networks you own or are authorized to assess. Feedback wanted I am looking for: Compatibility reports from different Android phones Feedback about permission handling False-positive reports Contributions, tests and documentation improvements Repository: https://github.com/theabhishekchandra/ZeroDroid

Google will start policing memory-hungry Android apps as a direct response to the RAM crisis. Spotted by TechCrunch, the company yesterday published a memo addressing the Play Store's role in enforcing new memory-usage restrictions. The post emphasizes the importance of meeting new memory usage limits for apps, in order "to help developers navigate industry-wide hardware […]

Google is setting new memory-use limits for Android apps as AI data centers contribute to hardware shortages that could leave lower-cost phones with less memory.

From Termux to a Freestyle VM: My Osintgram and HikerAPI Experiment After experimenting with Osintgram directly in Termux, I wanted to see how the same project behaved inside a Linux environment running through a Freestyle VM. The idea was not simply to reproduce the installation. I wanted to understand whether moving the project into the VM would make the HikerAPI troubleshooting any clearer. Why use a VM? Termux is capable of running many command-line tools directly on Android, but a VM provides a more conventional Linux environment. I connected to the Freestyle VM from Termux and worked with Osintgram from there. The project could start, but the API side still required investigation. The dependency confusion One of the first things I noticed was that there were multiple API-related components involved. I initially looked at the installed "hikerapi" package and its "Client" class. That alone wasn't enough to explain what Osintgram was doing. So I switched from inspecting only the Python environment to inspecting the project's source code. The HikerAPI-related code pointed me toward: src/hikercli.py This was much more informative because it showed where the client was being configured and how the access token entered the application. Checking the installed library I also checked the installed HikerAPI package rather than assuming I had the expected version. For example: python3 -m pip show hikerapi This let me verify the package that was actually installed in the VM. The important point here is that checking a package version and understanding how the application uses that package are two different troubleshooting steps. Separating authentication from Osintgram I found it useful to test the API independently instead of using Osintgram as the only diagnostic tool. For example: import requests headers = { "x-access-key": "YOUR_KEY" } r = requests.get( " https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/by/username?username=natgeo ", headers=headers ) print(r.json()) Again, "YOUR_KEY"

A polished update to Google’s foldable brings real improvements, but the price bump and rampant competition make it a tough sell.

It's currently only appearing on Pixels running Android 17.

With the new design of Nothing OS 5.0, app icons and widgets can use adaptive color to get color tints pulled from your wallpaper, which update whenever your wallpaper changes. Alongside Android's built-in Dynamic Colors, the company says it allows you to have specific elements change to match your wallpaper "while Nothing's predominantly monochrome character […]

Google is rolling out a new Android feature that's been proven to reduce, or even eliminate, motion sickness when using a phone inside a moving vehicle. Dubbed Motion Assist by Google, it's very similar to Apple's Motion Cues, first introduced in 2024. The Android 17 feature appears to be rolling out in phases, with some […]

GrapheneOS, an open source version of Android that prioritizes security and privacy, has detailed its plans for supporting Motorola smartphones. Official support is set to arrive next year, starting with traditional flagships, before rolling out to Motorola's foldable phones and perhaps cheaper models, eventually. In a Mastodon thread, the GrapheneOS Foundation announced that it will […]

How to get a photo below a strict KB limit Many government portals, job forms, school applications, and support websites reject an otherwise valid photo because it is larger than a fixed limit such as 100 KB or 200 KB. Standard gallery apps usually offer cropping or a quality percentage, but they do not tell you whether the final file will meet a specific upload limit. That is the problem I built FormFit to solve on Android. Why exact-KB compression is tricky File size depends on more than width and height. Image detail, color variation, output format, and compression quality all affect the result. A quality setting that works for one photo may leave another photo far above the required size. FormFit works toward a maximum KB target and adjusts the generated copy for you. The practical goal is to create a file at or below the limit while keeping it as clear as possible. Compress a photo on Android Install FormFit from Google Play . Open the photo-compression tool and select the image you need to upload. Enter the maximum file size required by the website or form. Optionally resize the image dimensions or choose JPG, PNG, or WebP for the generated copy. Run the compression, review the result, and save or share the new file. The original photo is not replaced. FormFit creates a separate output copy, so you can compare the result before uploading it. Remove metadata from generated copies Photos can contain metadata such as device or capture information. When you only need to submit the visible image, FormFit can remove metadata from the generated copy. This does not change the original file. Turn several photos into one PDF Some forms ask for a single PDF instead of multiple image files. FormFit can combine up to 20 selected photos into one PDF directly on the phone. This is useful for receipts, scanned notes, application documents, and other small document sets. On-device processing The selected photos and PDFs are processed on the Android device. FormFit does not req

📚 This is part 2 of a series. Part 1: The Origin Story Part 2: [Current Article] Part 3: Coming soon... Let me tell you about the day my crash reporting UI crashed. The Grey Screen One afternoon, my Android app's crash screen rendered all-grey. No content. No report button. Just a blank slate where the app's last line of defense should have been. The root cause? A stale file from Gradle's build cache after a major refactor. The compiled resource IDs no longer matched the packaged resource table. ViewBinding inflated the wrong layout, and a silent NullPointerException killed the crash screen itself. It was invisible in CI. It only appeared in specific rebuild scenarios. And it took hours to trace. That bug taught me something important: The fix isn't done when the patch ships. It's done when the lesson becomes automated. So I wrote a build-time task that reads the compiled class files directly, compares them against the final packaged resources, and verifies every constant matches. It runs automatically after every packaging step. You never have to remember to invoke it. That was the first of many incident-driven tools I built. The FAB That Disappeared A few weeks later, a developer tools Floating Action Button vanished from consumer apps. Debug menus inaccessible. Secure screens incorrectly enabled. Turns out, my shared library's BuildConfigUtils was reading the library's own BuildConfig —which is baked as "release" at publish time. An AAR can never know the consumer's build type. 25 files across 34 call sites were silently broken. I built a Gradle plugin that generates a SskBuildConfig object per consumer module, per variant, using AGP's onVariants callback. It registers generated source via KotlinCompile.source() —not reflection, which broke across AGP versions. It detects Android plugins by extension type, not hardcoded IDs, so it works with com.android.application , com.android.library , com.android.dynamic-feature , and any future Google plugin. Same package as

What if adding Kotlin and Java compilation to your application didn't mean building an entire compilation pipeline yourself? What if you could add Bytesmith, configure the filesystem once, provide your source files and output destination, and simply compile? That's the idea behind Bytesmith . Bytesmith is a Kotlin and Java compiler toolkit designed for JVM and Android applications. It provides a unified API for Kotlin, Java, and mixed-language compilation, while also supporting filesystem abstraction, custom classpaths, boot classpaths, compiler plugins, packaging, and diagnostics. Configure the environment, provide the source, specify the output, and compile. The problem Compiler tooling can become surprisingly difficult when it is tightly coupled to the environment in which it was originally designed to run. You might need to deal with: Kotlin compiler versions Kotlin standard libraries Java compilation Bootclasspath configuration Dependency classpaths Source discovery Output handling Android storage Storage Access Framework URIs Packaging Compiler diagnostics And then there is the question of where those files actually live. On a desktop JVM, you might have traditional filesystem paths: /home/user/project/src/Main.kt On Android, you might be working with application storage or files selected through the Storage Access Framework: content://... If your compiler API directly depends on java.io.File , your compilation code becomes coupled to one filesystem model. Bytesmith takes a different approach. Adding Bytesmith The goal is to make compilation something you can plug into an application. With Gradle: implementation ( "io.github.sifisofakude.bytesmith:bytesmith-common:1.0.0" ) After adding Bytesmith, configure the filesystem your application wants to use. For a JVM application: FileSystems . current = JvmFileSystem () For Android: FileSystems . current = AndroidSafFileSystem ( context ) Once the filesystem is configured, the rest of the compilation layer can opera

It was the final ten minutes of a high-stakes client presentation. I was mid-sentence, explaining a complex system migration, when my phone erupted with a loud, aggressive ringtone. The room went silent, but my phone did not. I scrambled to silence it, accidentally hitting the volume buttons while fumbling with the screen. That moment of pure, unadulterated embarrassment followed me for days. It was not the first time this had happened, but it was the time I decided I had finally had enough of relying on my own memory to toggle sound profiles before entering sensitive environments. Most of us live in a state of perpetual concern regarding our devices. We walk into movie theaters, attend religious services, or sit through medical consultations, constantly checking our pockets to ensure we have toggled the mute switch. If we forget, we face the social friction of a disruption. The existing solutions were either too manual—requiring a conscious effort I rarely possessed in the moment—or too intrusive, demanding constant location permissions and draining the battery to perform simple state changes. I wanted something that functioned as a set-and-forget background utility. I needed a system that understood the context of my environment without requiring me to interact with an interface every time my routine shifted. To build this, I had to architect a background service that could survive the aggressive power-management constraints of modern Android, specifically Doze mode. The primary challenge was ensuring that my sound-toggling logic fired precisely when a rule was triggered, even if the device had been sitting idle for hours. I initially experimented with a standard Service , but Android’s lifecycle management quickly killed it to save resources. I shifted to using a ForegroundService with a persistent notification, which is the standard approach for long-running tasks, but that only solved the visibility part. The real hurdle was the timing accuracy required for eve

Small language models can now run directly on phones. But most of them stop learning the moment they ship. For personal AI, that feels like a strange stopping point. Some of the most useful signals arrive only after the model acts: Did the user dismiss the notification? Did they open it later? Did they rewrite the suggestion? Did they ask for it again? These interactions contain useful information about the user, but they are delayed, private, and ambiguous. They are not clean labels, and they are not reliable scalar rewards. To explore this problem, we built Online-SDFT , an open-source prototype that continually fine-tunes a small language model from delayed interactions while keeping the learning loop on the device. The prototype uses: LiquidAI/LFM2.5-230M A rank-4 LoRA adapter ONNX Runtime Training A bounded on-device replay buffer An Android notification-routing testbed Once the model has been provisioned, inference, interaction storage, replay, and adapter updates all happen locally. Why standard fine-tuning is awkward here Suppose the model receives a notification and chooses one of three actions: Show it now Save it for later Archive it Supervised fine-tuning would require a correct action for every notification. But the phone never observes what the ideal action was. Reinforcement learning replaces the correct answer with a reward, but that reward is also difficult to define. Opening a notification does not necessarily mean it arrived at the right time. Ignoring it does not necessarily mean it was unimportant. The user may simply have been busy. There is another complication: the model only observes the result of the action it actually took. If it archives a notification, it cannot know what would have happened had it shown the notification immediately. What the phone receives is not a label or reward. It receives hindsight . Using the same model as student and teacher The core idea is simple: let the model reconsider its decision after seeing what happened

It happened during a quiet, solemn moment at a funeral. I felt the vibration in my pocket, and for a split second, I panicked. I had silenced my phone before entering, but I had accidentally toggled it back to normal mode while checking an email earlier that morning. In that room, the sound of a notification ping felt like a gunshot. The embarrassment was immediate and visceral. It was a clear signal that I needed a better way to manage my device's sound profile, a system that didn't rely on my flawed human memory. We live in an era of hyper-connectivity, yet our phones are surprisingly dumb when it comes to context awareness. I found myself constantly manually adjusting volume sliders. Meetings, gym sessions, prayer times, movie theaters—the list of places requiring silence is endless. Most existing solutions were either too heavy, requiring complex IFTTT integrations that lagged, or they were privacy-invasive, requiring constant cloud syncing. I wanted something that lived locally on my device, respected my data privacy, and didn't turn my phone into a brick by noon. The core problem wasn't just the silencing; it was the cognitive load of having to remember to revert those changes, which is how you end up missing important calls for the rest of the day. To build Muffle, I had to solve the geofencing puzzle. The temptation for any Android developer is to fire up a LocationRequest with high-accuracy settings and just poll the GPS coordinates. That is the fastest way to destroy battery life and get your app killed by the Android system's battery optimizations. Instead, I leaned into the GeofencingClient API. It is designed precisely for this use case: it lets the system handle the heavy lifting of location monitoring at the hardware level, rather than keeping the radio awake in my application process. I configured the GeofencingRequest using GEOFENCE_TRANSITION_ENTER and GEOFENCE_TRANSITION_EXIT triggers. The magic happens in the PendingIntent that gets fired when th

It is possible to achieve your desired work-life balance on your smartphone. Just set up separate accounts using this built-in Android feature.